Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[Fulcanelli]

All of these bare footprints were tested for DNA, but Meredith's DNA was not found in any of them. How do you explain that, if you think they were made with Meredith's blood? And why weren't any bare footprints found in the murder room, the source of all this blood supposedly tracked into the corridor?

There was no blood (and therefore DNA) left to test, it'd been washed off. Only the iron remained. They weren't even doing LCN tests on the prints, which is what would have been required. What would have been the point? If Meredith's DNA had been found, what would it have proved? Ammunition for the defence to argue 'Meredith lived there, we'd expect to find her DNA there, it doesn't mean it's from blood, could have been left at an earlier time...could be contamination.' If they'd have provided what you're asking for you'd have a prepared answer for it, which is why they didn't bother with LCN, which is what would have been needed. Moreover, they used luminol and that can damage DNA which is already sparse in blood which is made up mainly of red blood cells which don't have DNA.

 

[stilicho]

Rudy Guede's print is far too big for that print or its brother in the corridor. They are not even close to being a match.

You're not still going on with that washing a trainer in the bidet nonsense?

This to go along with RG putting on and taking off gloves all over the cottage to explain the appearance of his DNA in some places and not in others:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5480204&postcount=83

He has gloves on when handling the cell phones, the inside of Meredith's handbag, and inside Filomena's room, but gloves off at other times during the attack and afterwards.

@snook1: What do you mean by this?

Different judges, different prosecutor, different state of mind.

What different state of mind? It's going to be the same evidence. Are you suggesting that Italy installs evidence-ignoring loons in their appeals courts?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Fulcanelli says:

I can tell you from the Judge's Report that he reasons that at some point, in the room, they each stepped in blood and made their way to the bathroom to wash their feet (I presume hopping),

If that is how the judge reasons, he should be doing something else for a living.

In short, the judges deducted that the luminol prints were left not as a result of raw bloody footprints deposited and then cleaned, but rather that the prints were as a result of what they (Raffaele and Amanda) thought to be clean feet but were not, being stood down on the floor. It is puzzling,

Indeed it is. Why don't the prints form a trail? Why would they hop if they didn't even realize they had blood on their feet?

I don't see any plausible way of connecting the luminol footprints to the crime. And the lack of DNA in any of the hallway footprints is fatal to the hypothesis that they were made with blood.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Fulcanelli writes:

There was no blood (and therefore DNA) left to test, it'd been washed off. Only the iron remained. They weren't even doing LCN tests on the prints, which is what would have been required.

What is your source for this scientific information?

If Meredith's DNA had been found, what would it have proved? Ammunition for the defence to argue 'Meredith lived there, we'd expect to find her DNA there, it doesn't mean it's from blood, could have been left at an earlier time...could be contamination.'

Of course. Any given swab may turn up the DNA of anyone who has been on the premises. And that goes double when the police trash the place and indiscriminately handle everything in sight before tossing into one or another of many piles on the floor.

 

[Fulcanelli]

If that is how the judge reasons, he should be doing something else for a living.

It's a well reasoned, detailed, scientific and logical report. Have you read it yet Charlie?

Indeed it is. Why don't the prints form a trail? Why would they hop if they didn't even realize they had blood on their feet?

I would put it down yo two reasons. Firstly, a reluctance to put their wet feet down on a cold (and probably not very clean) floor and secondly, the report reasons that Amanda returned to the cottage the morning after the murder in order to clean. So, in my reckoning, some of the prints may have been casualties of her cleaning efforts. Of course, not deliberately as she wouldn't have been able to see them or even have known they were there, so it would have happened in the process of cleaning other things that 'could' be seen.

I don't see any plausible way of connecting the luminol footprints to the crime. And the lack of DNA in any of the hallway footprints is fatal to the hypothesis that they were made with blood.

How can bloody footprints 'not' be connected to the crime, especially when one of those prints is an exact match for the bloody print on the mat which is in Meredith's blood? And again I say, the fact DNA could not be retrieved from blood that was not only of so low volume it was invisible, but had also been treated with luminol that can potentially damage very low/negligible amounts of DNA is hardly surprising. An LCN test would have been required and in such a case, how does one prove it the DNA came from Meredith's blood rather then having been left as DNA at some earlier time or got there from third party transference? The fact is, there would have been little or no actual 'blood' to render DNA. The judge concludes that the blood had actually been washed off the feet in the bidet/shower. Therefore, what made the prints was not the blood that had been washed away, but the iron residue that remained from the blood. It's iron from blood that reacts with luminol, not the blood itself and you can't test iron for DNA.

 

[Fulcanelli]

What is your source for this scientific information?

The Motivations Report. The report does not go into explicit detail as to why there in no DNA in the blood, it doesn't need to as it provides the answer implicitly....the blood had been washed off of the feet before the prints were made, the prints being made instead with residue.

Of course. Any given swab may turn up the DNA of anyone who has been on the premises. And that goes double when the police trash the place and indiscriminately handle everything in sight before tossing into one or another of many piles on the floor.

Hardly. The police changed gloves before handling each new object, as was testified in court. And as for any swab able to pick up the DNA of anyone who'd been on the premises...possibly....but they didn't, did they Charlie? These swabs of the blood only turned up the DNA of Amanda mixed with Meredith's blood...not Filomena's, not Laura's, not Meredith's boyfriend, not Rudy's in the stains in the small bathroom or Filomena's room, not any other stranger. And Amanda's and Amanda's DNA alone was found multiple times in multiple stains. One may accept one as innocent, but what are the odds of finding hers multiple times and hers alone? And I would also add, the police could hardly have been blundering around as much as you are trying to make it. If they were contaminating things we'd expect to see the samples contaminated with the DNA of every man and his dog in those samples. We don't.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

iron

There was no blood (and therefore DNA) left to test, it'd been washed off. Only the iron remained.

How could iron remain without there being blood?

 

[Oliebol]

the blood had been washed off of the feet before the prints were made, the prints being made instead with residue.

How do they know that Amanda's prints weren't made the next morning with the blood in the hallway?

 

[snook1]

How do they know that Amanda's prints weren't made the next morning with the blood in the hallway?

They don't. They like to believe that they were made exaclty at the time of murder, but it is all speculating.They could easily be made the next morning, but it's also speculating.

 

[Fulcanelli]

How could iron remain without there being blood?

Because blood leaves iron behind even if the blood is washed away. This is the primary purpose of luminol...to detect blood that has been washed away.

 

[Fulcanelli]

How do they know that Amanda's prints weren't made the next morning with the blood in the hallway?

Because firstly, Amanda 'saw' the blood before stepping into the shower (in her story) and so wouldn't have then proceeded to go around stepping in it, secondly the blood was 'dry' and thirdly there was no blood source large enough in the corridor or the bathroom to coat the whole sole of her foot and lastly, according to Amanda she didn't walk barefoot in the corridor, but instead did the 'bathmat boogie' down the corridor to her room because there were no towels in the bathroom.

Also, it doesn't explain Raffaele's barefoot prints.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

citation

Because blood leaves iron behind even if the blood is washed away. This is the primary purpose of luminol...to detect blood that has been washed away.

The chemiluminescent reaction is catalyzed by the iron ion which is securely bound to the four nitrogen atoms of the protoporphyrin ring and the imidazole ring of histidine-87, which is an amino acid residue of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the most abundant protein within red blood cells. Do you have citation for your claim that iron is left behind?

 

[Fulcanelli]

The chemiluminescent reaction is catalyzed by the iron ion which is securely bound to the four nitrogen atoms of the protoporphyrin ring and the imidazole ring of histidine-87, which is an amino acid residue of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the most abundant protein within red blood cells. Do you have citation for your claim that iron is left behind?

How else then does the luminol detect blood that has been washed away and therefore no longer there? Do you have a citation that it isn't?

 

[lector]

In short, the judges deducted that the luminol prints were left not as a result of raw bloody footprints deposited and then cleaned, but rather that the prints were as a result of what they (Raffaele and Amanda) thought to be clean feet but were not, being stood down on the floor. It is puzzling, since at the same time the report maintains there was cleaning, but if not of the prints...then what? Hopefully, I'll be able to answer these questions more effectively once the report translations have progressed further.

Thanks for your focus on the whole aspect of the cleaning. This has been a source of puzzlement to me since I first became acquainted with this case - what was cleaned, and how? What is the specific evidence that indicates things were cleaned? I have been hoping that the judges' report would throw some light on this.

 

[katy_did]

Well Katy_did, I have a response for you from Kermit

Yes, I agree with Kermit that the FOA print is shorter than Guede's actual print. But what I am suggesting is that his own print is even more inaccurate in the opposite direction. There is no need to guess the length of Guede's footprint - we have Rinaldi's measurements, and we have an image of Guede's footprint. So let's try to see objectively how long Guede's footprint is.

First, I calculated it in the same way I calculated the previous measurements, using the ratio between length in pixels and actual length in millimetres. I used the four separate measurements of Guede's foot to do this, and got results of between 24.7cm and 25.7cm. As an example, the width of the image of Guede's foot (cropped to the approximate place Rinaldi measures to) was 180px; the length of the foot was 467px; and the actual width according to Rinaldi is 96mm. So the calculation is: 96 / 180 x 467 = 24.9cm.

This is quite short, so I checked using the same method as I did earlier, with the ruler Kermit uses for his Powerpoint. I decreased the width of Guede's foot to its actual measurement - 96mm - and checked the length. As you can see, the result was at the upper end of my estimate, around 25.7cm:

A bigger version is available here. Therefore we have:

FOA: 23.5cm (I'll accept Kermit's estimate here)
Actual size: 25.7cm (approx)
Kermit: 28.4cm

Incidentally, Raffaele's footprint is approximately 24cm in length, although it is bigger in the forefoot region than Guede's (I got 23.8 and 23.9cm in the two calculations I did). This is pretty consistent with the 2.5cm difference between his shoe size and Guede's, allowing for individual variations in length.

 

[katy_did]

Here is what the three footprints look like alongside one another: from left to right, Kermit's, the actual size print I used in the previous post, and the FOA print.

 

[katy_did]

My main point in regard to the bathmat footprint is that we have no need to use the length of the prints (always guesswork to some degree anyway) when we have the actual measurements of the forefeet of both Guede and Sollecito. These measurements supersede the early guesswork based on estimated foot length.

And the measurements show that Sollecito's foot is larger in this region than Guede's, meaning if we rule out Guede because his foot is 'too big' to have made the print, we also have to rule out Sollecito for the same reason. Guede's foot is 96mm x 55.5mm; Sollecito's is 99mm x 57mm. Footprint length, whatever that may be for each of them, is irrelevant here.

 

[katy_did]

How do they know that Amanda's prints weren't made the next morning with the blood in the hallway?

Or indeed from having stood on the bathmat and then walked to her room, which is what she said she did that morning. The way the jury have explained the luminol prints leaves the door wide open for the defense to make that claim. For one thing, it acknowledges that the prints may have been made not in blood, but in a diluted mix of blood/water, and it also removes the only real evidence of a clean-up since the prints themselves were not cleaned up...

 

[Kestrel]

Aside from the witness Quintevalle who saw Amanda early that morning heading off towards the cottage without Raffaele, no.

Marco Quintavalle clams to have seen Amanda waiting for his store to open at 7:45 AM the morning after the murder. He recognized Amanda a few days later from seeing her in the news.

The police then find receipts in Raffaele's flat showing he purchased bleach from Marco's store. But when they talk to Marco a couple weeks after the murder, he doesn't remember anything. Meanwhile the papers are full of speculation about cleanup of the crime scene, but none of this jogs Marco's memory.

A year later, after talking to a reporter working for Giornale dell'Umbria, Marco suddenly remembers seeing Amanda. He even recalls what she was wearing on the morning after the murder.

Marina Chiriboga, an employee working in the store on that morning, didn't see Amanda.

 

[stilicho]

Marco Quintavalle clams to have seen Amanda waiting for his store to open at 7:45 AM the morning after the murder. He recognized Amanda a few days later from seeing her in the news.

The police then find receipts in Raffaele's flat showing he purchased bleach from Marco's store. But when they talk to Marco a couple weeks after the murder, he doesn't remember anything. Meanwhile the papers are full of speculation about cleanup of the crime scene, but none of this jogs Marco's memory.

A year later, after talking to a reporter working for Giornale dell'Umbria, Marco suddenly remembers seeing Amanda. He even recalls what she was wearing on the morning after the murder.

Marina Chiriboga, an employee working in the store on that morning, didn't see Amanda.

In Frank's summary of what I presume to be a summary of the motivations report, this isn't quite what happened:

Indeed Quintavalle saw her waiting for the opening of his store at 7:45, then going towards the cottage. Quintavalle didn't say anything to the police because they didn't ask him. Only when he realized it was important, one year later, he went to the police.
Chiriboga didn't see Amanda, but Quintavalle had asked Chiriboga if she had seen Amanda that morning, which means he had really seen her.

(Source: http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2010/03/motivated-knox-and-sollecito-conviction.html )

Either Frank is wrong or you are wrong. By missing the important elements--Quintavalle knew what AK looked like because she visited the shop more than once and had strikingly non-Mediterranean features, the police didn't ask him if he'd seen her the morning of 02 NOV 2007, and Quintavalle had asked Chiriboga if she had seen AK--your version suggests that Quintavalle invented the story after seeing the media reports.

If Frank's summary of the summary is correct then Quintavalle's testimony is rock-solid.